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@JaimieAnzelone:

Maybe it's only me, but the way your post currently reads, it's not on the right side of Finextra Community Rule #5:

Do not use the site to attempt to sell your services and products

https://www.finextra.com/community/simpleterms.aspx

Had your post mentioned upfront about OFX 2.2 and that "EEI was one of the founding members of the OFX Consortium", I wouldn't have dreamt that it was a sales pitch:)

While announcing its recent data sharing initiative with Intuit, JPMorgan Chase has referenced Open Financial Exchange (OFX) 2.2 API (Source: American Banker). But, of course, I don't expect to find any mention of that technology in this article, which seems to be a sales pitch for EEI FS-API™, a product from the author's employer Enterprise Engineering, Inc.

Going by the examples they give, MoMMAs (Mobile Money Management Apps) give frivolous advice e.g. avoid that $4.50 coffee. The answers to the two questions asked of Cleo will be no different: What do I really do about the money I've already spent on Uber? If I can't have dinner, then do I starve??

Personally, I'd be willing to share my banking information with a money management app or bot under the following conditions:

1. They should use a technology that accesses only the info I permit them to access and without putting me to inconvenience. Screen-scraping via online banking password has been one prevalent technology and that fails this test because it's like handing over the keys to the kingdom - I've no control over what info the app can and cannot access. OFX is another prevalent tech that also fails this test because it requires me to log on to my online banking regularly to download the info. While announcing its recent data sharing initiative with Intuit, JPMC has referenced OFX API. I don't know much about this tech but maybe it's what will finally pass this test.
2. They give me truly valuable advice e.g. Earn $$$ more by moving your money from Bank X to Bank Y because Bank Y gives higher interest rate (or whatever reason).
3. They indemnify me from any losses arising out of data breach, if any, caused by third party access to my banking info.

But that's only me.

PayTM makes whopping losses whereas MoneyGram is profitable. Given that Ant Financial accorded a valuation of $5B for PayTM in its latest round of investment, its acquisition of MoneyGram for $880M looks like a steal.

What's "Dictonary.com"?

@RamanujBanerjee:

TY for your comment. 

I've written several posts about why cash will be around for a long time e.g. The Death Of Cash Is At Least 190 Years Away. While I don't disagree with your comment, this post is not about that subject. 

In the wake of the recent demonetization of high value currency notes in India, Indians faced a severe cash crunch, which led to explosive growth in PayTM and other e/m-wallets. In this post, I've tried to explain the dominance of PayTM over its rivals - not cash.

With that out of the way, let me answer your questions:

(a) PayTM can be funded with a credit card. BHIM / UPI can't. So even people who don't want an A2A transfer can use PayTM but they can't use BHIM.

(b) I don't have figures but, at least in my circle, children in the 12-18 year bracket are more likely to have smartphones than their elders.

(c) Even during the height of cash crunch, slower m-wallets never became popular in highly queued use cases like supermarket checkouts, where plastic ruled. If and when the cash crunch ends, I agree that cash will likely make a comeback in queued use cases like toll plazas. 

Yaay, I do know about Open Banking but I belong to the 60% that wouldn't consent to third parties accessing their banking information. The thrust of the customer campaign being planned - "...enabling consumers to compare and save on current accounts, it will also help them look for mortgages more easily and access better terms for loans." - is terribly lame. MoneySuperMarket, Which? etc. have been letting me do comparison shopping for current accounts and mortgages for ages without needing any access to my banking info. What more comparison will I get by letting some new-age MoMMA (Mobile Money Management App) access my banking info? If it's tips on how to save $4.50 on my next cup of coffee, I can do well without them.

In any case, it's not worth trusting my banking info to some startup and then be left holding the bag in the event of a data breach.

@CharmaineOak:

TY for your kind words. It's indeed a momentous time for payments. As the Chairman of HDFC Bank put it, what we're seeing in India is compression of 5 years of payment digitization in 5 weeks. I've done a straw poll of 15 PayTM users and 10 PayTM merchants. While most of the users have heard of UPI, none of them has installed it. None of the merchants have heard of UPI. When you're in India, you should try out PayTM, PayZapp, PhonePe, UPI, etc. and, if possible, conduct a straw poll of your own - I'm eager to compare notes of our findings!

@GaneshGuruvayur:

TY for your comment. 

1. Okay, let me take UK then. The country has had realtime DDA via FPS since 2008. But PayPal hasn't died in UK, either. Why? 
2. With all the realtime DDA products that India has been having for nearly 10 years, cash should've died but it  still accounts for >90% of retail payments. Why?
3. When I said "It's not necessary to load value into PayTM", I meant there's no need to transfer credit into the wallet, as is clear from the example I've given in the linked blog post. Many PayTM users have a zero balance. When they need to make a payment, they make it from the debit card stored on file with PayTM. They essentially use PayTM to avoid the friction of having to enter debit card details for every transaction. The amount that passes through PayTM exactly equals the amount of payment to be made, so absolutely no money lingers in the wallet. 
4. PayTM has not levied any cash out charge on merchants, at least not until 31 Dec 2016. Ditto UPI. If and when PayTM does, it will be 1%. This doesn't pose too much friction because UPI is not free either. MDR for UPI reportedly ranges between 0.7% and 2.5% (https://twitter.com/s_ketharaman/status/814765634043211776). 
5. I've a very different explanation for why banks are not going aggressive on promoting UPI:They earn more money via PayTM than UPI. Counterintuitive as it might seem, a PayTM top up fetches a bank around 1.5% fees, whereas a UPI transaction earns it much less (on an average). If and when they do, PayTM is not exactly going to be sleeping and watching banks overtake it. 
6. The bigger risk I see is if banks cut off PayTM from the payment rails they own. The nation's largest bank SBI has already done so. As a result, SBI debit card and bank account users have no use for PayTM (although people can still execute PayTM transactions with SBI credit cards). If this trend spreads to other banks, PayTM will face an existential threat.

@CharmaineOak:

You've hit the nail on the head. I use PayTM quite sparingly for this reason. Ever after finding a compelling reason to use it, I've devised a roundabout way to contain the amount of my financial info that state actors can get without even having to hack it!